In light of all the letters concerning pedestrians and crosswalks, I thought it was ironic that last week I was nearly run over by a young woman driver at Second and Adams streets.

As I walked south toward the old Copeland yard, a yellow car came flying up Adams from First Street at about 30 mph and sailed through the stop sign as if it wasn’t there.

Fortunately no other cars were in the intersection, but she breezed by me much too close for comfort. Two more steps into the crosswalk and I would have been dead.

Though I yelled at her she didn’t even notice, just stared straight ahead.

Twenty years ago, a woman with the same attitude toward driving sailed across Highway 99 at Circle Boulevard against all those lights and struck my pickup.

She was on her way to a job interview at Hewlett-Packard and wasn’t even aware that she was crossing the highway. Though she told this to the investigating officer, she was not cited.

My pickup was destroyed and I got a tremendous concussion, plus the loss of 40 percent of rotation of my neck and pain that has never stopped.

Do I sound bitter? You bet.

If you can’t think and drive at the same time, then leave the car home.

Dick Gallagher

Corvallis

We need many tools for sustainability

Megan McKenzie’s Nov. 15 “As I see it,” “Rethink GMOs as sustainable agriculture,” suggests keeping an open mind as we seek innovative and creative ways to move toward sustainability.

Don Boucher’s follow-up letter (“GMOs ‘Sustainable’?”, Nov. 16) acknowledges her intellectual challenge, but rejects GMO technology because of moral and ethical concerns about patenting of food crops.

Mr. Boucher asserts that only GMO crops can be patented, and that conventionally bred crops cannot, citing the 1980 Supreme Court decision in Diamond v. Chakrabarty.

He is incorrect: many utility patents have been issued for conventionally bred food crops and other plants. Such patents protect against unlawful propagation or sale of patented materials, applying equally to GMO as well as conventionally bred food crops.

Do patents complicate the process of evaluating costs, benefits and ethics of GMO technologies? Yes, just as they do for many other types of technologies.

Patent and plant variety protection laws were implemented to encourage innovation by allowing investors to recoup costs of research and development.

Is the U.S. patent system perfect? I would say not. And yet without such instruments, the pace of innovation would certainly be reduced.

There is no easy solution to sustainability in agriculture, and I’m pretty confident we will need many tools and innovative approaches to achieve it.

With proper safeguards and controls, GMO technology can play a part — if we let it.

David Harry

Philomath

Befriend a person with a disability

Fairview, until closed in 2000, essentially warehoused individuals with intellectual and related developmental disabilities. With good intentions but dehumanizing results, the state had created a site where people with disabilities experienced daily abuse of their human potential, their rights and their dignity.

Since the closure of Fairview, one in five Oregonians with developmental disabilities in state care — who is living in the community in group homes, foster care or supported living — has been named as a victim in an investigation of abuse.

There never is a justification for abuse, but we can be thankful that one in five is a vast improvement over the institutional model of care. We can be thankful that we have learned to identify abuse, and that we don’t hesitate to call one another on it.

Also, thankfully, there is an easily accomplished way we can each work toward an abuse-free neighborhood:

Become a friend of a person with disabilities. This relationship will provide natural, added awareness of issues and concerns.

Your occasional presence will provide casual support, not only for the person with disabilities, but the care provider, as well.

You will break the pattern of isolation that allows abuse to happen. You will demonstrate respect for individuals and their care providers when you invite them into your circle of friends.

And you will thank me for the suggestion, as you will gain more from the relationship than you realize from the outside looking in.

Karin Frederick

Executive director

The Arc of Benton County

Some wishes, thanks for our local schools

I attended the meeting of the Corvallis School Board on Monday, Nov. 5, and developed, thereby, “Thanks” to be given during this Thanksgiving holiday weekend. To:

• Parents/students of Franklin: That no board member would even move approval of a thinly-veiled recommendation by Superintendent Dawn Tarzian to destroy Franklin by making it partially an attendance-area school.

• Parents/students of Jefferson: That its students will have the option to attend Linus Pauling Middle School/Corvallis High under an amendment to the school boundary changes offered by Chairperson Blake Rodman and approved by board parents/students, not in the “Limited English Proficient”program.

• That the instruction they receive is more effective than that given to LEP students (as evidenced by depressingly low test scores) and their educational progress, in the future, will not be dependent upon the success of the “Continuous Improvement Program” recently presented/highly touted by school district administrators.

• Parents/students of Marist High in Eugene: That they now have former CHS “Super Principal” (my term) Jay Conroy.

• Myself (and many other older parents): That our child/ children went all the way through school — K-12 — during the stewardship of Dr. Thomas Wogaman.

P.S. Members of the Board asked, innocently, “Why has enrollment at CHS topped Crescent Valley High School’s by an average of 300-plus students the past four years?”

Answer: It’s new, conveniently in the center of town, appears (by turnout at CHS-CVHS football games) to have superior school spirit/parental support and, until this academic year, was lead by Mr. Conroy!

Hugh Richard White

Corvallis

Another event that Thanksgiving recalls

I know many people forget the date Nov. 22, 1963. Probably most of your readers were not even born then.

I will never forget that day. I was a college sophomore at St. Xavier College on the South Side of Chicago that Friday afternoon before Thanksgiving.

As I was walking down the hall of my dorm (Pacelli Hall) to join our regular Friday afternoon “wind down” bridge game in a common area, my friends were screaming, “Oh NO! Oh, NO!” Our wonderful young president president had been shot in Dallas.

John F. Kennedy was the president who gave us hope. He was the one who encouraged us to join the Peace Corps instead of the Iraq/Iran Corps; the one who seemed to love the Constitution.

And in a few minutes, he was dead. Lots of dreams died that day, too. The country we are living in today is nothing like the one he defended in World War II, and called on us to make even better.

This Thanksgiving Day 2007 — 44 years after his death — I give thanks for him, and I wish I had a president whose ideals I could honor as I did his, so long ago and, now, so far away.

Barbara Boudreaux

Corvallis